BERLIN (AP)
-- John Demjanjuk once was the focus of the world's
attention for the bloodcurdling crimes he stood
accused of. Today, he's attracting notice for
being the lowest-ranking person to go on trial
for Nazi crimes in World War II.
The latest chapter in a 32-year legal saga brings the retired Ohio autoworker
to a court in Munich in a case opening Monday
that breaks new ground in Germany's pursuit of
alleged Holocaust perpetrators.
If successful,
it could significantly lower the bar for who
is considered important enough to go to jail
for being part of the Nazi apparatus.
In the 1980s,
Demjanjuk stood trial in Israel accused of being
the notoriously brutal guard "Ivan the Terrible" at the Treblinka extermination camp. He was convicted, sentenced to death --
then freed when an Israeli court overturned the
ruling saying the evidence showed he was the
victim of mistaken identity.
Now, at age
89, he is accused of serving as a low-ranking
guard at the Sobibor death camp, charged with
being an accessory to the murders of 27,900 people
during the time he is alleged to have been there.
Demjanjuk
maintains he was a victim of the Nazis -- first
wounded as a Soviet soldier fighting German forces,
then captured and held as a prisoner of war under
brutal conditions.
German prosecutors
paint a different picture. After Ukrainian-born
Demjanjuk was in German captivity, they maintain,
he volunteered to serve with the fanatical German
SS and was posted to Sobibor in Nazi-occupied
Poland.
It is the
first time prosecutors have tried someone so
allegedly low-ranking without proof of a specific
offense. If Demjanjuk is convicted, other low-ranking
suspects could face prosecution.
"This
definitely marks a change in the decades-old
policies of the German judiciary -- a positive
change," said Efraim Zuroff, the top Nazi-hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
Immediately
after the war, top Nazis such as Hermann Goering
were convicted at war-crimes trials run by the
Allied powers. Investigations of the lower ranks
eventually fell to German courts.
Many of those
trials ended with short sentences, or acquittal,
of suspects in greater positions of responsibility
than Demjanjuk allegedly had. Demjanjuk is accused
of having served as a "Wachmann," a guard, the lowest rank of the "Hilfswillige" volunteers who were subordinate to German SS men.
For example,
Karl Streibel -- the commandant of the SS Trawniki
training camp where Demjanjuk allegedly was trained
-- was tried in Hamburg but acquitted in 1976
after the judges ruled it hadn't been proven
that he knew what the guards being trained would
be used for.
But today's
judges grew up in the 19550s and 1960s and recently
have approached war crimes cases differently
from their predecessors.
In August,
the same court that will hear Demjanjuk's case
convicted Josef Scheungraber, a former German
officer, of murder for the massacre of 10 civilians
in Italy in 1944 even though no witness saw him
give the order.
There are
no direct living witnesses in Demjanjuk's case
either -- but prosecutors argue that if he was
a guard at the death camp, that necessarily means
he was involved in the death machinery.
"In
the early 1950s there were certainly some mistakes
made, and sometimes there may have been an agenda
behind it," said Kurt Schrimm, head of the special German prosecutors' office responsible
for investigating Nazi-era crimes.
"One
must remember, however, that our office has embarked
since its founding in 1958 into completely uncharted
territory," he added. "It is unique that a people pursues their own crimes over decades, and we are
always learning more."
Demjanjuk's
family argues that there is pressure from the
Simon Wiesenthal Center, the U.S. Justice Department
and others to try him.
"I
think they're going to push forward to have the
trial no matter what, to have the media event
and make it seem like Germany is doing what it
can to hunt down and prosecute so-called Nazi
war criminals," John Demjanjuk Jr. told The Associated Press in a telephone interview, adding
that his father suffers from a bone marrow disease
and could only have months to live.
Schrimm said
it was not until 2008, when his prosecutors'
office found lists of Jews transported to Sobibor
during the time Demjanjuk was allegedly there,
that there was enough evidence to pursue a case
against him in Germany. Now, he said, there is
an obligation to proceed with the trial.
"It
is naturally difficult to deal with men who are
soon in their 90th year," Schrimm said. "But there are no doubts: The lawmakers decided in 1979 to remove the statute
of limitations for murder, and therefore I see
no reason to treat this case any differently."
Proving the
case is another matter.
Demjanjuk
maintains he was never at the camp and questions
the authenticity of one of the prosecution's
main pieces of evidence -- an SS identity card
that they say features a photo of a young, round-faced
Demjanjuk and that says he worked at Sobibor.
He claims
to be a victim of mistaken identity -- a Red
Army conscript from Ukraine who was captured
in Crimea in May, 1942 and held prisoner until
joining the Vlasov Army. This force of anti-communist
Soviet POWs and others was formed to fight with
the Germans against the Soviets in the final
months of the war.
Demjanjuk,
who is being tried in Munich because he lived
in the area briefly after the war, emigrated
to the U.S. in 1952 and gained citizenship in
1958.
He was extradited
to Israel in 1986 after the U.S. Justice Department's
Office of Special Investigations, or OSI, said
it had evidence that he was "Ivan the Terrible."
He went on
trial in 1987 and was convicted and sentenced
to death. But in 1993 the Israeli high court
overturned the ruling and freed him after it
received evidence that another Ukrainian, not
Demjanjuk, was that Nazi guard.
At the trial,
former Treblinka prisoners misidentified Demjanjuk
as Ivan the Terrible. But this time, there are
no Sobibor survivors who claim to remember him
at all.
Thomas Blatt,
a Sobibor survivor whose mother, father and brother
were killed immediately on arrival at the camp
in April 1943, is to testify at the German trial,
but he concedes that even if he had encountered
Demjanjuk, he wouldn't be able to remember him
after so many years.
"I
don't remember the faces of my parents right
now," said Blatt, 82. "How could I remember him?"
But he said
he still looks forward to testifying about the
role of the camp guards, whom he recalls seeing
returning from the gas chambers, their boots
splattered with the blood of Jews who resisted.
"That
is what I can tell, only what the group (has)
done. They were not regular guardsmen. They were
murderers."
Some evidence
against Demjanjuk comes from statements attributed
to Ignat Danilchenko, a now-deceased Ukrainian
who once served in the Soviet Army and was exiled
to Siberia following World War II for helping
the Nazis.
In 1979, he
told the Soviet KGB that he served with Demjanjuk
at Sobibor and that Demjanjuk "like all guards in the camp, participated in the mass killing of Jews."
But the OSI
itself has questioned the validity of his statements,
saying in reports that there are "numerous factual errors."
If convicted,
Demjanjuk faces a possible 15-year sentence,
though he could be given credit for some or all
of the seven years he spent behind bars in Israel.
Even if acquitted, however, Demjanjuk will likely
have to remain in Germany because his U.S. citizenship
has been revoked.
"There's
no justice in this case, regardless of the outcome," Demjanjuk Jr. said.
hdnews.net
google.com
|